Garth Stein Quotes

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

The memory is perpetually looking back when we have nothing present to entertain us. It is like those repositories in animals that are filled with food, on which they may ruminate when their present pastures fail.

My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

I exist only in the past.

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?

Memory is a form of time travel. That's something we do during the course of the day, every single day. The idea of actually being able to physically adjust that and change it instead of being haunted by it is a really human thing.

Remembrance of things past.

Recordar: To remember; from the Latin records, to pass back through the heart

The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present.

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.

I don't write diaries and things like that, but I have a fantastic memory. I call that like a magic carpet. I can really concentrate and travel back in the past I don't know how many years from now and evoke that space if I wanted.

I believe you can remember the future as much as the past.

There is no fence nor hedge round time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it if you can remember.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory. I like the atmospheres that result if episodes are narrated through the haze of memory.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

Let us say in the pocket of one of my old coats I find a movie ticket from many years ago. Once I see the ticket, not only do I remember that I saw this movie, but also scenes from this movie, which I think I have entirely forgotten, come back to me. Objects have this power, and I like it.